Data as a Product

How can using data as a product benefit your organisation?

As businesses become increasingly digital, they are required more than ever to collect and store large amounts of data, often from a range of sources. It is important that this data is stored and used in an organised way. Doing so will help you to utilise your data to guide organisation of your business and improve efficiencies.

When data is organised and structured effectively, it can provide valuable insights and help you make informed decisions about operations, products, and customers. However, many businesses struggle to effectively manage and utilise their data due to a variety of challenges. This is where using data as a product can really help, and why we’ve written a blog about it to get you started.

What problems are businesses currently facing with their data?

Many businesses’ data now comes from a multitude of sources. Having such a huge store of data can present problems when it comes to structuring and organisation. The manual organisation of data like spreadsheets is prone to errors and can also be complex and time consuming. The time and effort required to manually collect, clean, and analyse data is a tedious and resource-intensive process, especially for organisations with limited personnel or technology. ?

Another key problem that businesses with large volumes of data face is that it can be difficult and complex to work with. Such vast amounts of data require specialised skills and tools to extract meaningful insights from datasets. ?Data that is unstructured can include invoices and emails which can be prone to errors and inconsistencies. The volume of unstructured data that your business can hold may also compromise its accuracy and reliability and restrict business efficiencies. Often businesses and citizen users are unsure of where to find their data, or know the right pieces of data to use, which can lead to a mistrust in data and missed business opportunities.

These challenges are likely to be preventing your business from getting the most out of its data, which can make business decisions unclear. That's where the concept of data as a product comes in.

So, what does using data as a product mean?

Data as a product refers to the idea of treating data as a product that can be bought, sold, or traded - in the same way as traditional products or services. Think of it like the process of buying bread in a supermarket. It is where data can be used by someone either within or outside an organisation, the same way a physical product could be passed on. It can help to think about data in terms of food provenance; knowing where the ingredients (data) were sourced, and then what has happened to them (data lineage). By putting together different parts of data in the right way, businesses can then consume and take ownership of data effectively.

This approach to data involves packaging and delivering data in a standardised and usable format so the data can be interpreted and digested easily. Think of it like wrapping and labelling a loaf, so it is clear to customers what type of bread is inside. Using data as a product is a way of visually assessing or accessing data around a particular domain or topic and helps to monetise data later down the line.

The design of the data product can help the provenance of data from when it is first collected to where it is consumed. Understanding this data product lifecycle allows business owners to manage what can happen to the data and when.?This helps consumers of the data to trust the product they receive., a lot like your bread labelling telling you which farm your wheat came from, which mill ground the corn, what was added In the flour making process and how it was baked, stored and transported.

When is it time to start using data as a product?

If your organisation has reached a point where the amount of data you need to store is poorly understood or difficult to manage, it is probably time to consider using data as a product. Here are a number of other signs that mean it's time to start thinking about your data this way:

1.??????If your business needs to consolidate its data for it to be a useful source

2.??????If you don’t understand what has happened to your data from its source, to then reporting and sharing insight of the data

3.??????If the volume of data that your business is collecting has become too difficult to manage

4.??????If you are struggling to draw accurate insights from the data if different results are being produced from the same data

What are the benefits of using data as a product?

There are many benefits of using data as a product. Here are some that we think are key:

1.??????Increased Efficiency and Productivity

By treating data as a product, businesses can streamline their data management processes and reduce the time and effort required to collect, clean, and analyse data. This can lead to increased efficiency and productivity of businesses and faster time to insight – something all businesses want.

2.??????Enhanced Data Quality

Data as a product also helps to ensure that data is of high quality and meets certain standards. This supports organisations to have confidence in the accuracy and reliability of their data. Ensuring that your organisations data is of high quality improves the quality of reports based on more accurate insights and analysis. This can drive more informed business decisions.

3.??????Greater Data Reusability

Using data as a product enables businesses to easily share and reuse data within their organisation or with external stakeholders. This can save time, money, and resources. Being able to reuse clean and organised data can help businesses with collaboration and innovation and drive business goals forward. Creating a repeatable pipeline of data as a product can future proof businesses be ensuring their data collection and use is sustainable and accurate.

4.??????Data you can trust

When data is consumed as a product, you can trust in knowing what has happened to your data and where it has come from, meaning that accurate insights can drive business decisions with greater confidence.

5.??????Ease of use

Data as a product is much easier to use. It means that as a business, you won’t have to rerun and reconstruct your data sets every time, it is served to you in a structured format. ?

Using data as a product offers vast and impactful benefits for businesses. It can improve efficiency and productivity, enhance data quality, enable greater data reusability, enhance data security, and create new revenue streams. In the increasingly digital age that businesses work in, having organised and clean data should be a top priority for organisations.

To find out more about the services that Kompozable provides to help businesses use data as a product, contact us today.